While some consider unmanned technologies to be nearly universal solution for all tasks, and others speak of traditional warfare's end due to battlefield transparency, different opinion appeared in U.S. on Modern War Institute pages of famous West Point academy.
Retired Lieutenant General Eric Wesley, former Commanding General of Army Capabilities Integration Center, in quite concise publication drew attention to fact drones are not war's future, they are only problem requiring solution.
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Specifically, as author believes, human on battlefield cannot yet be replaced. There must be someone who can seize territory and hold it: someone still has to take the tree line, clear the basement, and stand in the rubble.
UAVs, like manned aviation, are attrition instrument, not solutions that made maneuver significantly more costly but did not make it less necessary. At the same time, in Eric Wesley's view, humanity already passed through this during World War I, when machine gun transformed infantry and cavalry attacks in open field into suicide.
Some observers, understandably given the bloody carnage, concluded that offensive ground warfare was over. Trench warfare, they said, was the future. They were wrong.
The machine gun was not the future. It was a problem. And British engineers created an ungainly, underpowered, mechanically unreliable iron box on tracks that could cross no man's land and suppress a machine gun nest at close range. The tank did not eliminate the machine gun problem. It solved it well enough to restore what the machine gun had taken away: the ability to move, exploit the enemy's vulnerabilities, break through and destroy his rear. Maneuver returned. Decisive results became possible again.
This is precisely why drone effect currently is maximally similar to what machine gun accomplished over a century ago. They sharply increased cost of advancing through open terrain but did not cancel warfare principles, did not invent new war theory. Drones created new problem that maneuver forces must solve.
In other words, key task is restoring maneuver capability. However, what specifically will enable this the author did not name, limiting himself to listing assets already available or in development: EW, blinding systems, autonomous ground systems taking main blow and giving people opportunity to exploit defense breach. It is, surely, a combination we have not yet employed at the scale now required.
The drone is a magnificent and lethal weapon. But magnificent and lethal weapons have always been the prelude to the next problem, not its solution. The visionaries who understand that will win the next war. Those who don't will be building drone factories while their adversary is thinking about how to seize the ground beneath them.
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